Among users of the K3b CD and DVD burning application there has been quite some confusion with the new audio project so I wrote a little overview of the new features and changes in version 0.12. Check out the K3b 0.12 New Feature Guide to get an idea of how much more there is under the hood in the new version.

It only happens if you are running an utf-8 environment and it only makes verification fail. But for the verification issue I know a fix. Well, not really a fix but a different verification approach which I will implement soon.

If I add a directory to a data cd project k3b looks itself into this directory and adds every single file to the project. It stores every information about the added directory, escpecially the content, at the time I choose the directory. That's really nonsense.

k3b should instead take the user much more verbatim: add this directory should mean: add this directory. Exclude that file or directory should mean: exclude this file. Or directory.

So the next time I want to make a backup of my data I just have to load the k3b project and burn my new backup disc. Then I don't miss any files added since I created the project. Or missing files don't prevent me from successfully burn my new disc.

I remember that using another burning application it does so, but I don't know which application it was. Maybe 'arson'?

To look in every single directory makes only sense if I want to compute the needed disc space. I see no single reason to save the information about directory contents into the project. Only disadvantages.

This is not nonsense at all! What makes you think K3b's data project is a backup project??? It is not!
It will NEVER act the way you say, becasue it makes no sense for a data project.
I have plans for a backup project which act this way but it won't be fast since users want size information for that, too.
You cannot have both: speed and full size information.
A data project is filled with files and folders which and won't change. Most users would be completely confused if the data project would act as you propose.

When backuping your home dir, tar archives play much better than adding the files directly to the CD. However, sometimes you want to burn a bunch of files and have online access to them. For example, a clippart, your mp3 collection. And, of course, burning to a DVD, what opens up the possibility of up to 4.4 GB (DL media is yet too expensive) of data and thousands of small files.

So, I do agree with Mark about having a option to store directories instead of files in the project. That would make burning my DVDs a much smoother experience. May be an option, in the cd or dvd project, to automatically recursivelly add files within a directory when a directory is added? The default behaviour would be enabled (mimicking the current behaviour), so that only users that really needs to create high volume projects, like my MP3 archive or Mark's backup, would need to disable it (using a checkbox in the project property, for example).

Yup, it's one of those apps that I bring up once in a while (I burn stuff quite rarely) and never have any problems with. It's always very simple to get what I want done and I never have to sit and wonder how something is done. Easily one of the best Linux apps.

I have a weird problem, not sure what it is.
I have some movies I burned on DVD5 some months back. (I have no way to know the version of k3b I used to burn them with)
I can put them in any home DVD player (Apex) and watch them normally.
Recently I took the same ISO image and burned a second copy of them for my son.
I always test after a burn. The movies play fine on my PC, but I put them in my home DVD player and they will NOT play, the player says "NO DISC"..
I put the disc in an old RCA (1998) DVD player and it played fine.
I took it next door and it played fine in my neighbors machine.

So, I took a disc at random and confirmed that it does play in the Apex.
I used K3b to copy the DVD to a new disc. The copy will NOT play, the original will.
I used k3b to burn the original. And I am burning from the same batch of blanks.
Here's the odd thing though, if I burn the movie to a DVD-RW it will play fine in the Apex, it's only DVD-R's that will no longer play in the Apex

Considering that I have confirmed that discs I burned a few months ago play just fine and discs that I burn now will not play, I can only assume that k3b is not doing something the right way.. I've never had any problems with the Apex, it's about 18 months old and has always played anything I stuck in it. It still does, as long as it's stuff I burned few months ago..

Some of the more recent DVD players have issues with DVD-Rs. The newer, expensive ones tend to be really picky about the disks (for me they play part way then the image starts getting corrupted and sometimes crashes the player).

The only problem with the last k3b, was that I and my wife searched for several minutes where the big BURN button was.
Finally we gave up, as it was obvious it was not there anymore.
I see it labelled "burn" in the screenshots here, but IIRC it was not labelled on my wife's desktop.
Well, we finally found it, but it was really annoying.

That is really a good thing.
What annoyed me really, was that in old versions, the burn button was well separated from others, while now, it is not remarkable among the other buttons. Putting text beside it is enough to make it remarkable again.
The only thing that will remain to fix is the french translation, which now say "burn" instead of the french word "graver".
Anyway I can do it myself, provided the .pot is up to date.
My wife does not understand english, that's why translations are very important.
Anyway, many thanks for K3B.
That's the first burning program that my wife can use and that does not scare her.
She is very confortable with it (sometimes she asks me questions, like for the burn button episode or translations lacking), it's amazing. She could not even use Nero !

slightly off-topic.
multisession CD burning with k3b has been a problem
with mandrake 10.1 community onwards. in 10.1
it was a bad cdrecord binary. I reverted to old
mdk 10.0 cdrecord and the problem was gone. In
mandriva LE again multisession mas buggy this
time their k3b binary was the culprit. I
reverted to k3b of mdk 10.1 and again it was working

there was a possibility in 3b but since kde 3.anything it is broken since kdelibs changed the way the ontext menu in the file browser is created. Now I cannot easily extend it. :(
So far I do not know a good solution...

I'm running Debian Linux 2.6.8, K3B 0.12.2, growisofs 5.21, mkisofs 2.1. When
creating data DVDs in K3B, I started setting the option in K3B to verify
written data. This is failing. I checked the file on the DVD against the original file on the hard disk with md5sum and the hashes are different.

To see where the difference arises, I created an ISO image of the file
using mkisofs (-J -R), on the command line - and still using K3B, burned that *image* to a DVD. On that DVD, the MD5 hash was the same as the original. (Of course,growisofs is used to burn the ISO image, but the mkisofs portion is
bypassed?).

Is this a known issue? Is there some compatibility parameter to pass into growisofs?